


Ritual of Khef

by SenkoWakimarin



Category: Batman (Movies - Nolan), Dark Tower - Stephen King, Joker (2019)
Genre: Bonding, Children Ritualistically Dehydrating Themselves, Dehydration, M/M, Pre-Fall of Gilead (The Dark Tower Series), Rituals, gunslinger AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-18
Updated: 2020-04-18
Packaged: 2021-02-23 12:03:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23711215
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SenkoWakimarin/pseuds/SenkoWakimarin
Summary: To share khef is to share water and more, something even a babby knows the meaning of.
Relationships: Arthur Fleck & Joker (DCU)
Kudos: 4





	Ritual of Khef

**Author's Note:**

  * For [mr-finch (soubriquet)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/soubriquet/gifts).



> If you've never read sai King's Dark Tower series, much of this won't make terrible much sense, but I imagine the tags told ya that fine. 
> 
> In this AU, Joker and Arthur are raised up in Gilead as apprentices to become gunslingers. Both come from minor nobility, as if common in those children chosen to walk this path. In this fic, they're still but babbies, Joker twelve and Arthur ten, and still far from their trials, but already close as can be. They have, by this point, already established a fine habit of latching to one another and finding ways to get into trouble together.

They’d found the book in one of the dustier corners of Gilead’s archives. Joker thinks it would be more accurate to say  _ Arthur _ found the book, though they’d both been pulling tomes from the shelves to pour over; Arthur was always the one who found the things most worth looking at, as though he was led to them, a want for knowledge feeling it’s way to the information contained in the great leather bound books and scroll cases.

It wasn’t a book they’d have been allowed to take from the archives, and certainly not the sort of book they could have taken to one of the archive pages to ask for clarification. Honestly, Joker thought perhaps it wasn’t a book boys their age were meant to handle at all, but after months and years of their constant presence among these books, it seemed the archivists had given up trying to keep them out.

It had eaten up an entire afternoon, curled up with a filched copy of the great Dictionaries that sat on the research desks and the cracked, faded tome, laying on the floor between the great stacks and shelves of books. At twelve years old against Arthur’s ten, Joker had a better grasp on the convoluted old High Speech the book was penned in, but it was Arthur who took the meaning from the passages they worked out, and it was Arthur who realized that the book was a collection of old traditions practiced by the gunslingers of ages past.

The one they translate fully is a ritual of khef-sharing, something so archaic and formal it makes them giggle to read. It’s the sort of thing that would seem over the top in a play, the kind of out-of-fashion sincerity that was both alluring and deserving only of mockery. 

It was also terribly simple for two boys alone on a weekend to do alone, given somewhere private to camp and a spare waterskin.

Basically, they had to fast from one dawn to the next, pouring out a measure of water from a half-full waterskin each hour until the final hour, after which they'd share what water was left after saying some pretty words. The language in the book was much more flowery than that, and took a good few pages to say what was really very simple, but that only made it more amusing and bizarrely appealing.

They find the book late in the season of Sowing, and hatch a plan, laughing at the daring and the solemnity of such a secret, old thing, to sneak away on their next free weekend at the start of Mid-Summer. 

As the book stated explicitly that they were meant to fast and bring naught with them but the clothes on their backs and waterskin ‘no more than half-fed’, it was no hardship to make the plan, only the finding of time any real stress. Even in that, it’s the agony of waiting that makes Joker itch, rubbing restlessly at the scar on his palm where he and Arthur once traded blood in the private, age-old ritual of boys the world round. 

Joker thinks, setting out to the woods where they trained with bow and bah and throwing knives, and where they tested their survival and endurance, that he and Arthur have long known they were ka-bound. Joker thinks ka-tet is meant to encompass more than just two -- certainly the greatest figures in legend were never bound as pairs -- but no one has ever felt as right when standing beside Joker as Arthur does.

The Ritual of Khef is about proclaiming such a devotion, proving it before any god or man who’d dare question it. The book had seemed to imply that it was meant for pairs, but the language was opaque and confusing, and it could just as easily have been small groups of three or more. Perhaps there was more context in the pages preceding the ritual description; they'd not taken the time to find out.

What Joker figures is, even if it  _ wasn't _ meant for pairs, it never said a pair couldn't do it. 

Sharing khef is done even now, common enough; sharing khef is a fancy way of saying sharing things, food and water and secrets. In High Speech, khef was just water, but like most things in High Speech 'just' was a silly term to use; the language was thick with metaphor and make-like and it was easy to take the wrong meaning if one wasn't thinking in the old-fashioned circuitous way the old books used, where nothing was ever stated outright but instead set up in a series of allusions and clues.

Point being, Joker and Arthur have shared khef plenty since they decided to be friends. They've shared waterskins and bites from the same apple; they've traded whispered, furious secrets in dark rooms; they've bled together and cried some, too, sure. No one else has ever been that close to Joker, nor to Arthur either, Joker thinks, so it's fair to think the ritual is only a formalizing of something they've already been doing.

Certainly thinking that makes it easier to slip out together into the woods, a weekend when they're meant to be getting ready to be sent back to their blood for a visit. Their teachers and the ways of the gunslingers say that blood is deeply important, but Joker would rather be belted for missing the carriage out to his father's holding than miss the chance to do this. The blood he shares with Harold Lynch is thinner, he thinks, than that he’s shared with Arthur Blackwood since he was ten.

Crossing into the thick stand of trees afore the sun had done more than peered above the horizon, at first felt like a lark. They’d both, as any ‘prentice would have by their ages, spent nights alone in these woods, testing endurance or learning to survive in some half-tamed version of the wild. 

Going as a pair after several such tests should be a joy, and in a way it is, even at the pass of the first hour as they, quietly laughing, tip out a splash of their water onto the dewy underbrush. Even then, they’re both touched by the first hints of thirst, but it’s only one day, and the inherent silliness of standing still and silent while a mouthful of water is wasted on the ground is too much not to provoke giggles before they carry on hiking.

Pouring out that share of water seems less silly each hour that passes, and by the time the sun is filtering bright through the leaves and the gnats have begun to swarm and bite, neither of them are laughing. Any man, it is said, can survive a trek of three days without water, so long as he is provided with shade and rest at the close of that third day. A well trained gunslinger can last longer, and it’s known that the Manni folk have secret ways of training their bodies to detach need from want, letting them take their bodies through extremes of pain and thirst that the uninitiated couldn’t imagine.

They are not gunslingers, nor Manni, nor even men. They are boys, and thirsty, and as the day grows hot around them, they begin to see why such a seemingly simple -- and seemingly  _ silly  _ \-- ritual may have fallen out of favour. 

At the start, they walk, wandering the woods and poking about at interesting bits of woodfall, noting crops of mushroom and the explosions of colour on the berry bushes they find. The mushrooms are edible and the berries would be sweet and refreshing, but neither of them suggest breaking their fast or ending the ritual. When Joker hears the sound of a stream ahead, distantly and around noon, he leads them quietly away from it, and if Arthur has any thoughts about the change in direction, he doesn’t speak them.

Every hour, marked out neat in Joker’s mind and confirmed by the change in their shadows, they pour out a mouthful of water from the skin. It’s no longer funny. When Arthur comments dryly that he’s no longer able to sweat, Joker clasps their cold fingers together and leads him on into the darker shade of the thicker woods.

Around them, they can hear the shuffle of deer and rabbit. Joker posits that the woods are stocked to some level; they find sign of more things edible and safe than those that might kill a man stranded, and there’s little sign of anything more dangerous than a stag in season would be. This being where the 'prentices are all taken, in groups for lessons and singleton for testing those lessons, it follows that there should be some level of safety built into the wild.

Half-tame. Joker doesn't know why that makes him feel so uneasy.

The woods in Mid-Summer at hot and humid. Joker thinks at first the humidity helps; surely they're slaking a degree of their thirst just by breathing. His head is pounding and Arthur's voice, usually sweet to his ear, sounds dry and rough; the buzz of insect wings and the soft calls of the birds make him feel prickly and irritable. This throat aches, and the slosh of the waterskin is maddening. 

Sharing their too-small store of water is no longer anything to giggle about. Joker can't remember if they agreed in words or not, but suddenly the share they mete out for the earth is miserly, a sip rather than a mouthful as they continue on.

By evening, neither of them are speaking much at all. Night seems welcoming as the air begins to cool, but then they are both shivering, until Joker calls a halt and Arthur willingly scoots in close beside him. Arthur's fingers are icy; they feel soothing against the chapped heat of Joker's lips when he tries to breathe warmth on them. The ritual feels, suddenly, much less like a game. 

It had seemed easy, this morning, slipping out into the pale edge of dawn and running away into the woods for a day. No food, to flint and steel, no bed roll. They hadn't even thought, rushing out into the crisp, clear morning, to bring a cloak to string up as a shelter should the weather have turned.

They were boys, Joker thought, just foolish boys. He sits on a fallen tree, holding Arthur close and humming his way through one of the old songs his mother had once liked, watching the sky as the moon rises. Grapefruit Moon, she'd called it, but Joker couldn't remember the words, only the lilting melody.

Arthur has to remind him twice through the night, as he starts to doze, to pour out from the water skin. It seems awfully light now, and Joker hates the thought --  _ fears _ the thought -- of missing the timing, skipping a single hour mark now. Tired as he is, thirsty and exhausted and weary with this non-game as he is, it would make it all for nothing if they missed anything now.

He can't have it be for nothing. No one will know what they've done out here but each other, but  _ Arthur _ will know, and it becomes something like an obsession, for Joker, that Arthur should know, by action if not by word, that he's come to take this all quite seriously. That he's seeing it through, that for no one but Arthur has he pushed this far or this hard.

Neither of them sleep, not really. Arthur dozes on Joker's shoulder and Joker nods off to the deepening of Arthur's breath, but the faintest noise around them wakes one or the other, and Joker has gotten good enough with his mental clock that he barely needs to glance around to know how much time has passed.

When thin fingers of warm dawn light creep in, Joker rouses Arthur from his latest doze, and Arthur kneels across from him in the dirt. The water Joker pours onto the ground seems less a sin now, so close to the end; there's still a goodly portion swelling the bottom of the skin, a day's worth of careful rationing for a single man. Plenty to get two boys through a few hour's walk back to Gilead.

Joker passes the skin solemnly to Arthur. "What slakes your thirst slakes mine," he says softly, quoting the book in dry, rasping High Speech. "Drink deep, friend."

Arthur's smile is a fitful thing as he tips the skin to his mouth and takes a long pull. There’s a brief and shameful flutter of fear in Joker, that Arthur will drink it all, but of course he doesn’t, and Joker blushes at having thought it at all, turning his face away as Arthur passes him the skin.

“What quenches your need quenches mine,” Arthur quotes, his voice terribly sincere as he passes the waterskin back. “Drink deep, friend.”

In years to come, they’ll both go longer with less, and Joker knows that one some level even as he lifts the skin to his lips. One day this will seem a silly game, a foolish bit of play for two boys always too ready to be alone together. Right now, having his first mouthful of water in a full day, Joker thinks this is as close to a religious experience as a non-believer can have. It humbles him, and thrills him, and he laughs as he offers the skin back to Arthur and climbs to his feet.

They’ve shared khef many times before, but now they’ve shared this as well, something that will linger in them and seed a well of experience and emotion. It’s another tangle between them, another way they’re entwined, and Joker loves that fiercely. 

They’ve shared  _ khef _ and the  _ ritual _ of it as well, and they can drink deep of that memory for the rest of their lives, he thinks. 


End file.
